COMICS BLEND

Si Spurrier (X-Men Legacy, X-Club) launches a new creator-owned series with artist P.J. Holden this week from Titan Comics.

Numbercruncher is an “off-the-wall romance mixing time-travel, life-after-death and coal-black comedy.”

What does the writer who turned Professor Xavier’s troubled son into a leading man have in store with this creation?

From the publisher:

Numbercruncher follows a brilliant Mathematician who dies young, enters the afterlife and discovers a way to cheat the terrifying Divine Calculator. He schemes to be endlessly reincarnated within the lifespan of the woman he loves, no matter how often the violent bailiffs of the Karmic Accountancy cut short each life. It falls to one such bailiff – the surly Bastard Zane – to put a stop to the time-twisting romance once and for all, before the Mathematician can pull-off his greatest trick and escape Existential Justice forever!

 

Spurrier teams with artist P.J. Holden (Judge Dredd Megazine, 2000 A.D.) who delivers the black and white style.

“When Si first proposed Numbercruncher to me, it was clear we’d need to play with some different techniques for this multi-layered, multi-reality story; flipping between the afterlife and the real world was a key element, and we needed something to make those realities distinct. And, being a huge fan of the Pressburger and Powell film “A Matter of Life and Death” (a romance about a dying World War II pilot, which similarly flits between a monochromatic afterlife and a technicolour real world), it seemed fairly obvious that the best way to do that was to have the afterlife be a sort of dreamy, textured b&w world, and the real world a much more comic book style, pure lineart with color. And, when Zane moves from the afterlife to the real world, crashing that b&w into the color, visually it would be show-stopping, and look like nothing else out there,” says Holden.

“PJ and I worked out socks off on Numbercruncher – a time-traveling romantic comedy thriller with more twists than Agatha Christies’s corkscrew – so it’s enormously satisfying to see it published by such a prestigious institution as Titan, and hugely exciting that it’s part of their new all-original-content initiative,” says Spurrier.

The story was originally serialized in black and white in Judge Dredd Megazine in the UK. Titan Comics is expanding the series and publishing in color for the first time. Numbercruncher #1 arrives in comic shops July, 10, 2013 and hits on all the usual digital suspects too.

After the mindtrip Spurrier is spinning in X-Men: Legacy I’m eager to check out Spurrier without boundaries in a creator-owned book out this Wednesday!

By Editor